We are excited to release a major update to our catalog of binary black hole simulations, available here. Such simulations are key to LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA being able to extract science from their gravitational wave detections. This catalog update comes six years after our last catalog, with too many improvements to list here. Our catalog now has 3,756 simulations, the largest and most accurate numerical relativity catalog to date. This data is freely available via our data server (https://data.black-holes.org/) and through the sxs package for python. Here’s a sampling of some more extreme systems in our catalog, showcasing a lot of the physics we can capture:

What happens when a neutron star is swallowed whole by a companion black hole? For a typical merger scenario, the lack of matter left outside the remnant black hole is thought to make such mergers quiet in electromagnetic bands. However, if the infalling neutron star harbors a strong magnetic field and is surrounded with tenuous, highly magnetized plasma (magnetosphere), a strong disturbance in the circumbinary magnetosphere can drive powerful electromagnetic bursts.